I would like to share my thoughts with you.

Do Men Lose Respect for Women on First Date Sex?

by Lovely Haitian on July 17, 2014

At some point during Steve Harvey’s “reign of terror,” there was an intense debate on the politics of when a woman should feel comfortable enough to sleep with a man of her choosing. The rhetoric at that time period stated a woman should enforce a 90-day rule in order to not lose the respect of the man she wanted to sleep with. The rule was also suggested to allow a woman time to properly assess whether the man in question actually liked her for her, or just liked her for sex. I was a relatively young lad at the time thinking to myself, “do mean really disrespect women if they sleep with them on the first date?” The short answer, per usual, is it depends on the man in question, but it bears writing that I have never actually seen this line of thinking in action.

In my personal conversations with men sleeping with women after a first date, I haven’t really heard anything negative. Sleeping together quickly doesn’t cancel out the chance for a relationship, her “worth” as a woman hasn’t been affected in a negative manner, and it hardly ever amounts to anything more than, “the date was great so we ended up having sex afterward.” Because I’ve seen that side of this particular situation so frequently it really hadn’t dawned on me that men felt the opposite way until I got a little older. So let’s address that.

Men who judge women for having sex with them on the first date are allowed to do so, although I’m not sure how they reconcile having less respect for a woman they chose to sleep with on a first date when they were active participants. For women, I’d imagine it’s a bit hard to tell when those are the men they’re choosing to sleep with (which may lend credence to Steve Harvey’s much maligned/celebrated plan to wait and see). In any event, I’m of the opinion a man judging a woman’s ability to make an adult decision based on the timeliness of sex, likely has his own issues regarding either sex or women’s sexuality. That might seem like a stretch, but when you consider the fact a man in this situation is essentially placing the blame solely on the woman and sees her as “less than” while not penalizing himself for doing the same, it doesn’t exactly speak highly of him. Women ought to be more cognizant of situations like that, but given the patriarchal society we live in, unfortunately, too many women will place the blame on themselves as well.

Switching gears a bit, I’d like to provide another perspective on this situation too. Over the course of my years on this Earth, I’ve heard a number of women assume that the reason a man didn’t want to date them after they had sex on the first date is because he no longer respected them. Being on the other side of that conversation as well, I can say the answer to that perception is a tad bit more varied than women would like to believe. In some cases, it isn’t really a problem of sleeping with a woman on the first date, rather the sex was weak so he simply opted not to further engage in the relationship anymore. In other cases, I’ve heard men say there were interested in a woman but the situation (as often happens in dating) just fell apart and never grew into anything. I say that to say there are times where women might attribute early sex as the reason why a man no longer wanted to date them when in reality it was something else entirely.

Suffice it to say there are men out there who no longer respect women after they have sex with them on the first date. There are also men out there who have loved and married women they slept with on the first date. There isn’t a universal answer on this topic. Chances are, if a man is penalizing a woman for having sex on the first date, he probably has a deeper issue which likely has nothing to do with women in general and everything to do with the society he grew up in and how thinks the actions of women should be dictated. In some cases, lack of respect after sex on the first date may not be why the relationship never matured. There were other factors, but that just happened to be the easiest one to point to.